If you need to illustrate the people or department structure of your company or organization, you don't require specialized software or expensive templates. The Organization Chart template from the SmartArt graphic gallery provides powerful tools for making organization diagrams. Check Using the Organizational Chart Tool for the details of creating the new organizational chart.

Microsoft Word (like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint) proposes tools to create and update organizational charts, but only for the hierarchical organizations. A hierarchical organization is a tree-like organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except the root, is subordinate to a single other node, i.e., has only one parent.

A flowchart or flow chart usually shows steps of the task, process, or workflow. Microsoft Word provides many predefined SmartArt templates that you can use to make a flowchart, including visually appealing basic flowchart templates with pictures. However, if you have a process with a tangled flow or you need a custom layout, you can build a complex flowchart in Word using rectangular, diamond, round, and other box types.

The organizational chart, or organigram, is a diagram of the structure and relationships of the company or other organization. If you have Visio, you can build a huge organization histogram up to 1000 shapes with a very complex structure. SmartArt diagrams are much simple and recommended for smaller organizations, but you can add many visual effects and use Office theming for your organization diagrams. Using Microsoft Word built-in tools, you can easily create and share functional, divisional, or matrix org charts. A killer feature of SmartArt graphics templates is that you simply type and paste the text and the template positions and re-arranges the blocks automatically.

Sometimes you need to reassign some positions in the organizational chart from one place to another. Word isn't a really convenient application for organizational charts as Excel, but you have some possibilities to do that.

Many useful features in Word (like in Excel and other Microsoft Office applications) disappear from version to version, from patch to patch... The function Convert to Shapes also disappeared.

When you create a shape in your document, it is created with the default style and any text that you type has the default font.

For some charts or diagrams, you need to create a regular polygon – equiangular (all angles are equal) or equilateral (all sides have the same length). E.g., equilateral triangle, regular square, etc.

Every time you add, move or resize shapes (e.g., flowchart shapes), and very soon, it becomes tedious to align them. Fortunately, Microsoft Word proposes Gridlines that can help to organize shapes and other objects in your document.

Business process charts like employee routines, document preparation, and approval, or online user navigation path on a website or a Web store are different from academic flows of algorithms. Usually, academic applications use a limited number of standard shape types, but in business, different shapes give a better look and simplify understanding. However, it is hard to decide which shape is appropriate for the specific block.